Lennox Broster

Lennox Ross Broster, OBE (1889 – 12 April 1965) was a South African-born surgeon who spent most of his career as a consultant at Charing Cross Hospital, London. He served with the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I, for which he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

After the war he specialised in the treatment of endocrine disease and took a particular interest in congenital adrenal hyperplasia, leading him to devise a new technique for surgical removal of the adrenal gland. In the 1930s and 1940s Broster was among the first surgeons to operate routinely on intersex patients, in work that received frequent coverage in the British press and helped to establish Charing Cross Hospital as a centre for intersex and transgender medicine. His patients during this period included the Olympic athlete Mark Weston, who was an intersex trans man.

Broster was a longtime member of the British Medical Association's Council and a chairman of the Commonwealth Medical Advisory Bureau's committee of management. With Raymond Greene, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Section of Endocrinology of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Early life and war service

Broster was born in South Africa in 1889, the son of Charles John Broster. He was educated in Grahamstown, first at St. Andrew's College, then at Rhodes University College. In 1909 Broster received a Rhodes Scholarship and began studying medicine at Trinity College, Oxford. He continued his medical training at Guy's Hospital, graduating as Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery in 1914. then promoted to captain on 10 February 1916 and major on 25 February 1918. On two occasions Broster was mentioned in dispatches. Broster relinquished his command on 11 February 1919.

Broster was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1919 Birthday Honours.

After the war, Broster completed his medical education. He received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1919. In 1921 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. In 1922 he qualified as Master of Surgery. In 1933 became a full surgeon at the hospital, and he remained there as a consultant for the rest of his career. Although employed as a General Surgeon, he took a special interest in endocrinology. The condition was known at the time as "adreno-genital syndrome", although the term now used is congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

As part of this work, Broster devised a new method for adrenalectomy which he reported in a 1932 paper. At the time, operations of this type often involved resection of a rib so that the surgeon could gain access to the adrenal gland. In Broster's less destructive technique, a long, oblique incision was made over the rib that covered the adrenal gland and the rib was fractured, allowing the incision to be continued through the parietal pleura. The diaphragm was then divided, giving access to the gland.

In the 1930s and 1940s Broster not only continued to work on congenital adrenal hyperplasia, but also provided surgical and hormonal treatment to intersex patients more generally, in collaboration with the psychiatrist Clifford Allen. This attracted considerable press attention to Broster and Charing Cross during the 1930s; a 1938 story in the News of the World described Broster as "the famous surgeon, who has brought new hope and happiness into the baffled lives of many men and women who were desirous of changing their sex". Although journalists often described the treatment as sex changing (as in the preceding quotation), the patients they wrote about would more accurately be described as intersex rather than transsexual, In 1936 it was reported that he had received two operations at Charing Cross Hospital from Broster, In the 1950s Broster's work was taken up by John Randell, another surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital, who provided sex reassignment surgery to several hundred transsexuals during his career. In 1948 the South African Medical Association invited him to lecture in South Africa, and in 1950 he was a visiting professor of surgery at Cairo University. Broster became one of the Section's two vice-presidents and then president after the death of the post's initial holder, Walter Langdon-Brown.

In 1950 Broster became chairman of the Commonwealth Medical Advisory Bureau's committee of management.

Personal life

Friends described Broster as patriotic and a strong supporter of the Commonwealth of Nations. He wrote to The Times in 1956 commending "British contributions to the Commonwealth and Empire, especially in tropical medicine".

Broster won a Rugby Blue at Oxford in 1912 and 1913

Stroke and death

Broster suffered a stroke after retiring from Charing Cross Hospital, when about to sit down at Lord's Cricket Ground to watch a match. Although at first he lost the ability to speak or control his right leg, he made a partial recovery. Broster died on 12 April 1965.